Writing takes two forms: writing that is about art and the work of other artists and writing that is intended to be a component of the artwork. Sometimes this second category might seem like very short stories. All writings are copyrighted.

About Art

Some Kinds of Duration

Nicholas Mangan, The Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2012(unpublished essay)Slow and Fast Happenings[1]Photocopies are fast. Press the button and out they come. A carbon replica of a type of codex that may itself become outmoded –consider here the digitalisation of text – so fast is the pace of technological change that what remains constant might well be only the ritual of transferral – a ritual that involves the translation from one format to another, which, when we think about it more poetically might itself be a kind of measurement of time: Actual time, meaning that it takes a while to scan and reformat books for on-line reading, and Systemic time, the kind of time that becomes linked through a consistency or repetition of human action. For example the uploading of entire libraries onto the web is an act of codifying that links back to the scribe on the streets of ancient Alexandria: and this type of time has the possibility of an altogether different sort of duration. In Nicholas Mangan’s installation at CCP, Some Kinds of Duration, we encounter evidence of the way that time changes its speed and shape. The title of the exhibition comes from chapter four of George Kubler’s 1962 book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things[1], in which Kubler posits the theory that objects or things and human actions are linked by a continuum that transverses the short term or immediacy of a given era and instead flows laterally across history[2]. Time is therefore measurable as a range of durations conceived visually as shapes. Moreover the artefacts that are created in these shapes of time can resemble each other due to the archetypal nature of an image base that projects forward from the past, through into the future. For Kubler artists and inventors understand this multiplicity of durations for they imagine backwards and forwards through time in order to meet the needs of the present[3]. At the entrance to Mangan’s exhibition is a carbon coated sheet of A3 photocopy paper pressed flat like a specimen underneath the glass plate of the copier itself and illuminated by a thin fluorescent tube. Like a relic from a natural disaster the image is obscured beyond recognition, copied repeatedly by Mangan until no legible components remain; all is black carbon; all is gone or still yet to come. This image of the void, lit up in the darkness, might not be only a metaphor for the eventual erasure of all things and all thoughts, but could equally be a representation of time condensed to one point: now. Inside the darkened exhibition space a crumbling cement sculpture cast from a Canon NP6030 photocopier stands alone in a makeshift corner under a bare florescent light. Despite its state of blackened decay it is instantly recognisable as a ubiquitous piece of office equipment, a machine invented to solve the need of mass reproduction. This exact model was produced in 1992, but that hardly matters; both its predecessors and descents carry the echoes and reverberations of its familiarity. The passing of the photocopier out of our working lives and into the archive of the museum is a fast happening, barely with us before it is gone. The technology, the mechanics, have been surpassed, but the carbon, that element found in stars and human bodies remains. The endurance of ancient temples, such as the Mayan in Central America is a slow happening; built by a civilization with vastly different requirements to our own, these architectural monuments have survived relatively intact due to isolation and the simplicity of their materials. Stone is a fundamental material, hewn from nature it remains nature regardless of being shaped as a square rather than a round. Reinforced concrete made possible the shift in scale that now defines modernist cities, not just in height, but also vastness. The new materials of the 20th century shifted the time frame for building works, monumental structures as well as cheaply built mass housing could appear quickly. Time sped up. But so too did decay. The unforseen limitations of 20th Century building materials that have affected even iconic modernist structures (Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, our own Nauru House) alerted us some time ago to the mechanical, and therefore suggested the philosophical failure of one of modernism’s mantras: make it new[4]. Mangan’s ‘monumental’ photocopier, made out of reinforced concrete and in a manner suggestive of an architectural form, is in fact a poor copy, a crumbling simulacra that hints at, what may be, the short-lived nature of modernity. When looked at closely the concrete photocopier is startlingly similar to the final ruinous state of Sydney’s Prymont Incinerator, a once commanding array of cubist inspired geometric shapes, minimally finished with Aztec motifs intended to make overt the monumentality of the Incinerator and it’s link back through time to the earlier architectural monument. Designed by Walter and Marion Burley Griffin in 1938 the incinerator fell into disuse and was finally demolished in 1992 to make the land available for development[5]. The final condition of the incinerator is equally startlingly close in appearance to the ancient ruins its designs originally refer to. This dreadful irony, the fact that the incinerator inspired by the temple would so quickly come to resemble the temple-in-ruin refers of course to different kinds of duration, to the fast and slow of human endeavour and need. It does this not only through the question why this and not that; why the temple and not the incinerator, but moreover the visual similarities point to the commonality of durational experiences. All durations resemble each other regardless of their existence in the real time world, for all durations are linked by human creativity. Two moving image works are included in Mangan’s exhibition: a film in which the patterned surface of one of the remaining tiles, salvaged from the demolished incinerator and on display at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is slowly panned across from dark to light in the manner of a photocopy scanner, our gaze becoming that of the machine, and a slide show projection of grainy black and white photocopies of images of the Mayan temples alongside photographs and drawings pertaining to the construction and demolition of the Pyrmont Incinerator. Of key significance is that the visual parity is such that it is difficult to tell whether an individual image is of the temple or the incinerator, for, as Mangan suggests, conceptually they may both be the same thing. If we think about time not as a linear progression forward, but rather as a set of actions or activities linked through the necessity for human inventiveness, or creativity, we can see that the thing that links an obsolete photocopier, the now destroyed Pyrmont Incinerator and the Mayan ruins is not only the uncanny fact that at one fixed point in time – right now in the Gallery – they all visually resemble each other, it is also the length of their duration. Within each of these different symbols of duration lies the thread of human agency as each epoch devises artefacts that meet its own needs and ultimately reveal our common capacity to imagine both backwards and forwards, to encounter existence multitudinously - to know both the slow and the fast.

An Order of Sorts - the paintings of Peter Westwood

-accompanying the 2010 exhibition Die Back held at Jenny Port Gallery

What do we do when the systems we live by are revealed to be meaningless?

Do you make lists? I do. When I make a list I always include at least one item I have already completed. There is always one task that I can strike off immediately. This trick provides enormous relief, giving me peace of mind and the necessary sense of progress required to tackle the remaining jobs. It is as if only by cheating my own imperfect system that I can begin to move out of chaos towards order.

In Peter Westwood’s paintings it is the physical act of painting, of making something out of nothing that creates an order of sorts. It is by layering swathes of colour, by drawing in shapes and defining edges that Westwood creates an order out of the potential that awaits all paintings: the possibility for the subject to disappear into an elemental chaos of pigmented messiness and undisciplined matter. The slippery trick that is painting reveals itself in Westwood’s work: here, a geometric structure that is a doorway, there, a conglomerate of stools, and occasionally a passage that is nothing to do with reality but everything to do with balance and correctness.

Is the best we can ever hope for a moment of clarity? A moment in which the image before us matches up with our idea of logic? When we crawled out of the primordial mire did we dream in our collective nascent humanity that we would one day be making paintings about the mire that is the great failure of the 20th Century’s political systems to effect social change? And more profoundly, our collective failure to create that elusive but longed for sense of fairness and social order?

Westwood’s imagery is sourced from photos he has taken in the course of living. While doing other things Westwood came across the neatly made bed of a tramp who had set up home under a bridge. While living another life Westwood wandered through an abandoned building in China and saw the remains of a physics department set up in a University built by Mao in order to educate the same people who might later be publicly denounced on the University’s notice boards. It is impossible not to gasp at the enormity of the failure of global communism. The great leap forward has at the end of the day been as meaningless as the travails of the labourer whose physical expenditure has gone into the building of a physics laboratory that will be, by the time these paintings are made, demolished, rebuilt and erased from memory. Everything passes and the Universe continues to expand. However, if we’re lucky there are some things that might endure. Feeling, for example, remains. A taxidermed head of a deer looks out from the canvas at us, forever startled as it must have been upon the shock of its death, its glass eye staring wildly.

In an age when the individuals we don’t know are termed randoms, the homeless person whose bedding was so neat stands as a symbol of our failure to protect each other, our terrible failure to provide succor, and of our inability to comfort our fellow man. The abandoned University Halls stand, of-course, as symbols for the failure of modernity to deliver a future that is better than the past: a future that is kinder and more equitable. Ideologies have come and gone, with barely the blink of a dead deer’s eye. The same deer that was once running in the wild is now a display in an obscure museum, visited by few, its hair worn thin from the wear and tear of the tiny insects who have made it their home.

In Westwood’s paintings we learn that the random nature of human existence points towards an inescapable overarching reality: out of chaos can come no order, just passages of clarity, as precise and wondrous as a blur of deep pink against a rectangle of orange.

September 2010

In Between - the paintings of Michael Jager

- accompanying the 2010 exhibition, The desire to be else where shown at Project Space, RMIT

We understand edges. We understand the absolute authority of two straight lines converging together to form a corner. The laws of physics determines that the sheet of glass that both illuminates and shields Jager’s paintings must end. With a sharpness that we feel in our finger tips the edge of the glass announces the end of the ride. The blue line will not continue, the spill of hot pink paint stops. Wild, indiscriminate, exquisite, jewel-like paint becomes the reason and logic of man-made architecture and constructed space.

We understand the gallery wall. It is the thing that sits behind the art, it is the larger contextural frame that we see but don’t notice. By painting the gallery walls, Jager presents his glass paintings with the opportunity to continue on, to flow into something larger, something impermanent and conceptually open-ended. At this point everything changes. Where is the painting and where is the wall? We know that this wall will not stay this particular colour, we understand that it will return to its proper state of gallery unobtrusiveness, so what is the painting to be, we ask ourselves? Is it the glass rectangle or is it the glass rectangle over another painting? In which case, what happens when that other paining changes? Suddenly we don’t understand as much as we thought we did .

The paintings have entered into that space that is in-between.

Every idea hovers for a moment between being something and being nothing. Do we dismiss it with the slightest shake of the head or do we delve more deeply into the thought and allow it to become? This is what Jager means when he asks himself ‘can this be a painting? ’ In approaching Jager’s work as a series of moments, of ideas or thoughts that might be we understand that they are not really abstractions at all. The strict formalist pursuit of a vision that is clear and precise which defines traditional abstraction is not operating in these paintings. These paintings are not about arriving at a conclusion. Instead these works are more akin to a broken kaleidescope that with each turn of the wheel allows the glitter and beads to reform themselves with progressively more abandon.

These paintings are ideas about paintings.

Painting on glass requires a reversal of thought. Because we see through the painting from behind the conventional process of working towards an image is not possible. The idea that a mistake can be painted out or hidden underneath another layer of paint doesn’t work. In these paintings the first is also the last layer of paint. The top is also the bottom. It is therefore impossible to see these paintings as something simple. We are seduced by their beauty and then denied access to their content. Held at arms length always we have no option but to look, and to look and to look. Gazing deeper and seeing more. At what point then do we see the nothingness in the pictures? Jolted out of our reverie by the reflection on the glass of a movement behind us, we turn around to look out from the painting and into the painted room. Looking back at the surface we return with a shock to their slightness: they are after all just marks and daubs of colour. Comprehending at once that we cannot comprehend these pictures we again find ourselves in the unstable world of ‘in-between’.

Thinking in-between the present and the past.

The sense that these paintings are a selection of moments in the history of painting that have been cut out, mixed up and spilt across their glass base/cover likens them to the photographic process by which an image is captured, reversed, reversed again and made appear through a mix of chemicals. The fact that the glossy surface of these paintings reminds us of the perfection of the photographic surface or that the flattening out of depth that occurs through the depth of field in the lens also occurs in Jager’s paintings through their obvious layering may be merely coincidental, however the fact that these paintings extend outside their parameters has cinematic consequences, and might go some way to explaining the strange sense of narrative in this work. Like a film still these paintings are suggestive of a bigger story.

Like photographs Jager’s paintings shift between object and image. As a result of the process of photography by the time the photograph is printed it is already an artifact. Despite the hand-made quality of the paint application in Jager’s paintings, that famous link with the artist’s hand that painting allows through its visceral materiality is denied to us. The act of painting is a memory in these pictures, embedded in their syntax, obviously of primary importance, but not given primacy, these works are in every sense contradictory.

The question Jager poses can this be a painting is the question that all painters have asked themselves, and the answer is of-course more simple than we imagine. If the function of art is to create questions, to avoid obvious and rigid solutions and to challenge us to think about the things we don’t think about such as gallery walls and authorship and edges and beginnings and endings then yes, this can be a painting and painting can and must be this.

October 2010

About Everything Else

The Flatness

Do you want to talk about the flatness?

Everyone wants to talk about the flatness. Yeah, it’s true. When I first moved here I
was surprised by how flat it was, even though everyone had already told me that
‘you know, it’s really flat over there’, I still found it hard to believe just
how flat it is.

And yeah, I suppose it is pretty flat. More than the
flatness I really noticed how few trees there are. Where I’m from there were
lots of trees. So, that was a big change too. I’d visited Rob, of-course, lots
of times, but it was still, you know, a big thing to move the kids here. They
love it, of-course. Yeah, they love it. Here in the flat, riding their dirt
bikes around. Shopping’s a bit of a drag. It’s a long way to the city and the
kids are so fussy about what they
wear. Jesus Christ, like they should have a say, eh? They’re really into those
skate brands. Zoo York and Element. Can’t buy Billabong anymore. No way.

Are your kids fussy?

So what I do now is I go to the city probably once every few
months and buy up clothes, but things are expensive, aren’t they? And they just
refuse to wear hand-me-downs. “I’m not going to school in that’” is what they
say. There really should be a school uniform. I was used to there being a
school uniform. It cuts out a lot of problems. And the kids look good, don’t they?
All dressed the same. When we first moved in Rob went to the school and asked
why there was no school uniform. I mean, he just expected that there would be a
school uniform. It really bothered him, but I said to him, “love, I didn’t move
here so that things would be exactly the same as they were”. I mean, it’s ok,
isn’t it, for things to be different?

It’s like the flatness. You get used to things,
don’t you?

Jan. 2011

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